Michael is a cultural historian of the Victorian age and a Visiting Professor of English at the University of Southampton. Known for the clarity of his writing and the accessibility of his talks, he has published extensively with Cambridge University Press, Yale University Press, Oxford University Press, Longman and Macmillan, and has lectured in eighteen countries outside the UK.
News
The Heart and Soul of a Statesman
‘An enjoyable and acute examination of the Victorian politician’s spiritual life. The author knows what he is talking about and chooses accurate facts from original sources judiciously to tell the story in under 200 pages.’
Christopher Howes, Daily Telegraph
‘Aside from the obsession with sin, what this beautifully written and sympathetic but not sycophantic study brings out above all is Gladstone’s enormous energy and wide range of interests. Michael Wheeler is ideally placed to probe Gladstone’s spiritual life.’
Ian Bradley, The Tablet
‘All Gladstone’s biographers are indebted to the monumental work that the historian Colin Matthew undertook in editing his diaries. But Wheeler gets closer still to the heart of the man. . . . A highly readable, entertaining, and instructive book, as we would expect from Wheeler, a master of his art.’
Jeremy Morris, Church Times
‘A masterpiece. Beautifully written and genuinely captures the heart and soul of Gladstone’
Patrick Derham, Chairman of Gladstone’s Library
Michael’s chapter on ‘The Bible’ has been published in Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, ed. Martin Dubois, Oxford University Press, 2025.
Work in progress
Michael is currently working on a new book for Yale University Press, telling the story of two fascinating weekend house parties hosted by Gladstone at Hawarden Castle, his home in Flintshire, in 1878. John Ruskin, who had been very rude about Gladstone in print, was guest of honour each time. Among the supporting cast are Lord Acton, the Duke of Argyll, Henry Scott Holland, Edward Talbot, Edward Wickham and members of the next generation of Gladstones and their cousins the Lytteltons. Not only did the conversation flow, but it was recorded in some detail in the diaries and letters of the participants, a rare survival.
About Michael Wheeler
Having taken a double first in English at Magdalene College Cambridge and a doctorate at University College London, Michael became Lecturer and later Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, where he masterminded the project to build the Ruskin Library, before moving to Hampshire, where he was co-Director of Chawton House Library and Professor (now Visiting Professor) at the University of Southampton. Michael was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Surrey. He and David Carroll were joint general editors of the Longman Literature in English series (30 vols.). During a decade lecturing for NADFAS, in the UK, Germany and Australia, Michael was in great demand. He is a former Lay Canon and Member of Chapter at Winchester Cathedral and a former Chairman of Trustees at Gladstone’s Library.
Michael is a member of the Athenæum, regular reviewer for the Church Times and chairman of the Murray Bequest to Birkbeck College, a bequest established by his late cousin Professor Peter Murray and Linda Murray, art historians.
He is married to the therapist Susan Woodhead and lives in Andover, Hampshire, where he is Chairman of Andover Chamber Choir.
Talks
Michael’s talks are designed for general audiences and are based on many years of research, much of it associated with his books.
In the gallery below are just a sample of talks available. Hover over or press an image below for their titles.
Writing Home
Jane Austen's Houses
The Glories of Winchester Cathedral
Literary venice
A British Love Affair
Art and the English Bible
1611 – 2011
Looking at Dickens
1812 – 2012
Prophetic Ruskin
And the Origins of the National Trust
Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites
The Lamp of Memory
Ruskin and Architecture
The Sun is God
Turner, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites
William Holman Hunt
Religion in Victorian Art
The Victorian Way of Death
Talks more
Other talks include
Gladstone reads his Contemporaries
The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in 19th Century English Culture
Punch at the Athenæum
Holman Hunt’s The Light of the World
St John and the Victorians
Publications
List of publications:
Books
(Author)
The Year That Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves & Letters of 1845
(Cambridge University Press, 30 November 2022), 280pp
This lively account shows how a single year came to epitomise so many of the overarching themes of the Victorian age. An inviting read even for those already familiar with the episodes depicted, this is a meticulous and thoroughly- researched tour de force of scholarship by an author who always has new things to say.
Rohan McWilliam, Anglia Ruskin University
Remarkably informative, interesting, well-researched, and well-expressed, this study complements the many existing books on Victorian life and culture with both well-known and little-known material approached from a fresh point of view and supplemented in places by the use of hitherto unpublished documents.
Rosemary Ashton, Emeritus Quain Professor of English Language and Literature, University College London
Professor Michael Wheeler discusses his book The Year That Shaped the Victorian Age: Lives, Loves and Letters of 1845, with Professor Ado Quayson in a recent episode of Contours: The Cambridge Literary Studies Hour.
The Athenæum:‘More Than Just Another London Club’
(Yale University Press, 2020), 415pp
Scholarly, impish, outward-looking, and eminently readable. This is how club histories should be written.
Seth Alexander Thévoz, London Journal
Michael discussed the club and the book with Michael Palin, a fellow member HERE
St John and the Victorians
(Cambridge University Press, 2011), 269pp
A model of interdisciplinary research into religious ideas. Wheeler brings wide reading and deep learning to bear on the ‘cultural afterlife of the fourth gospel in Victorian Britain’. He gives a clear, eminently readable analysis that provides new insights at every turn. Wheeler’s analysis deepens our understanding of Victorian culture as a whole: it should go on the reading list of any serious Victorianist.
Julie Melnyk, Victorian Review
The Old Enemies: Catholic and Protestant in Nineteenth-Century English Culture
(Cambridge University Press, 2006), 352pp
The Old Enemies is a book of exhilaratingly wide scope. Wheeler sets the period’s great men in context, and some of the book’s most effective sections chart the popular scandal aroused by such episodes as Newman’s conversion to Catholicism and the so-called Gorham Judgement, over a priest’s appointment. A densely sourced and richly suggestive book.
Alison Shell, Times Literary Supplement
Ruskin’s God
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture, 24 (Cambridge University Press, 1999), 302pp
Magisterial.
Philip Davies, The Reader
Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology
(Cambridge University Press, 1990), 456pp. (Winner of The Conference on Christianity and Literature Award (USA), 1991-92.)
The book is what George Steiner has called it, a work of “formidable and incisive learning”. In a brilliant conclusion he relates ideas of the Day of Reckoning with the judgmental endings of the great Victorian novelists.
Penelope Fitzgerald, The Observer
Abridged version: Heaven, Hell and the Victorians
(Cambridge University Press, 1994), 279pp
English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 1830-1890
Longman Literature in English Series (London and New York: Longman, 1985; rpt. 1986, 1989, 1990), 265pp; second edn 1994, 292pp
His learning, taut style, and intelligence as a reader make his work one that students (not to mention other readers) will profit from.
Barry V. Qualls, Victorian Studies
York Notes: Pickwick Papers
(London: Longman/York, 1981), 72pp
The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction
(London and Basingstoke: Macmillan 1979), 182pp
Wheeler’s The Art of Allusion is especially good in its awareness of the Victorianness of a device we tend to appropriate as quintessentially modern in its esoteric sophistication.
Nina Auerbach, Nineteenth-Century Fiction
(Editor)
The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture
(Co-editor with Nigel Whiteley, and contributor)
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 238pp
Ruskin and Environment: The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century
(Editor and contributor)
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 202pp
Time and Tide: Ruskin Studies 1996
(Editor)
(London: Pilkington, 1996), 145pp
Transcript of the two MSS in Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, in A Digital Edition of Ruskin’s Modern Painters volume I (2000)
(Founding general editor, later manuscripts editor)
BOOKLETS
Jane Austen and Winchester Cathedral
(Winchester: Winchester Cathedral, 2017), 14pp
The Kindest Cut of All: On the Making of Gravestones in the Kindersley Workshop
(with Lida Kindersley)
(Cambridge: Cardozo Kindersley, 2005), 56pp
Ruskin’s Museums and Galleries: The Treasury, the Storehouse and the School
A Lecture Delivered at the National Gallery, London, 21 November 1994
(London: Pilkington Press, 1994), 24pp
Wordsworth, Rydal and Victorian Literature
(Rydal: Armitt Trust and Rydal Church, 1995), 19pp
Keble, Ruskin, and The Light of the World
A Lecture delivered in Keble College Chapel on Sunday 28 January 1996
(Oxford: Keble College, 1996), 22pp
ARTICLES AND CHAPTERS IN BOOKS
‘A Rude and Strange Production: Narrative Clues and Mysteries in Wuthering Heights‘, in Critical Dimensions: Essays in Honour of Aurelio Zanco, edited by M. Curreli and A. Marino (Saste: Athenaeum, 1978), pp. 377-96
‘Elizabeth Jennings and Gerard Manley Hopkins’, in Hopkins Among the Poets: Studies in Modern Responses to Gerard Manley Hopkins, edited by Richard F. Giles, International Hopkins Association Monograph 3 (1985), 104-6
‘Tennyson, Newman and the Question of Authority’, in The Interpretation of Belief: Coleridge, Schleiermacher and Romanticism, edited by David Jasper (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 185-201
‘”Can These Dry Bones Live?”: Questions of Belief in a Future Life’ in The Critical Spirit and the Will to Believe: Essays in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Religion, edited by David Jasper and T.R. Wright (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 23-36
‘Introduction’; ‘Ruskin Among the Ruins: Tradition and the Temple’; ‘Introductory Note on “The Lamp of Memory”‘, in The Lamp of Memory: Ruskin, Tradition and Architecture, edited by Michael Wheeler and Nigel Whiteley (1992), pp.1-17, 77-97, 213-14: see (a) above
‘The Dream of Gerontius: From Verse Drama to Music Drama’, in Critical Essays on John Henry Newman, edited by Ed Block, Jr, ELS monograph series, 55 (Victoria, BC: University of Victoria, 1992), pp.89-103
‘John Ruskin’, in A Companion to Aesthetics, edited by David E. Cooper, Blackwell Companions to Philosophy (Oxford and Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1992), pp.372-74
‘John Frederick Smith’, in The Dictionary of National Biography: Missing Persons, edited by C.S. Nicholls (Oxford and New York: Oxford UP, 1993), p.616
‘Introduction’, ‘Environment and Apocalypse’, in Ruskin and Environment: The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 1-9, 165-86.
‘Introduction’, in The CD-ROM of the Works of John Ruskin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Ruskin Foundation, 1996), pp.1-11
(with David Barron) ‘John Ruskin’, in European Bibliography of Resources in English Studies (1997)
‘“Inscribed upon its visionary sides”: on reading mountains‘, in Sublime Inspiration: The Art of Mountains from Turner to Hillary (Kendal: Abbot Hall Art Gallery, 1997), pp.17-24
‘Gladstone and Ruskin’, in Gladstone, edited by Peter J. Jagger (London and Rio Grande: Hambledon, 1998), pp.177-95
‘Ruskin’s Christian Theory of Art’, in English Literature, Theology and the Curriculum, ed. Liam Gearon, Theology in Dialogue series, ed. Ian Markham (London and New York: Cassell, 1999), pp.190-205
‘The Light of the World as “true sacred art”: Ruskin and William Holman Hunt’, in Ruskin’s Artists: Studies in the Victorian Visual Economy – Papers from the Ruskin Programme, Lancaster University, ed. Robert Hewison (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp.111-27
‘Byzantine “purple” and Ruskin’s St Mark’s, Venice’, in Through the Looking Glass: Byzantium Through British Eyes, ed. Robin Cormack and Elizabeth Jeffreys (Aldershot and Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 2000), pp.9-18
Entries on Catholicism, Church of England, Keble, Manning, Newman, Religious literature, Ruskin, Wiseman, in The Grolier Encyclopedia of the Victorian Era (New York: Grolier, 2004)
‘Preface’, in John Keble in Context, ed. Kirstie Blair (London: Anthem, 2004), pp. xi-xiii.
‘ “One of the larger lost continents”: Religion in the Victorian novel’, in A Concise Companion to the Victorian Novel, ed. Francis O’ Gorman (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp.180-201
‘The Variant and the Vatican: Catholic and Protestant Authority in Nineteenth-Century English Culture’, in Varianten – Variants – Variantes, ed. Christa Jansohn und Bodo Plachta, Beihefte zu editio, 22 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), pp. 177-88.
‘Religion’, in Jane Austen in Context, ed. Janet Todd (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 404-12.
‘The Possibility of Watts: Religion and Spirituality in Victorian England’, in Mark Bills and Barbara Bryant et al., G.F. Watts, Victorian Visionary: Highlights from the Watts Gallery Collection (New Haven and London: Yale University Press / Watts Gallery, 2008), pp. 51-7.
‘Ruskin and his Contemporaries Reading the King James Bible’, in The King James Bible after 400 Years: Literary, Linguistic and Cultural influences, ed. Hannibal Hamlin and Norman W. Jones (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 234-52.
‘Messiah and the King James Bible’, programme note for commemorative performance in Westminster Abbey (29 November 2011), pp. 5-7.
‘The Bible and Art’, in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. IV: 1750 to the Present, ed. John Riches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015)
‘An Outspoken Environmental Prophet’, in Victorian Visionary: John Ruskin and the Realization of the Ideal, ed. Peter X. Accardo (Cambridge, Mass.: Houghton Library, 2019), pp. 21-27.
‘Gladstone Reads his Contemporaries’, in The Edinburgh History of Reading: Modern Readers, ed. Mary Hammond(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 83-103.
‘The Bible’, in Gerard Manley Hopkins in Context, ed. Martin Dubois (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2025)
AND NUMEROUS ARTICLES IN JOURNALS …
Michael Wheeler featured as an interviewee in the film Quintessentially British, a feature documentary celebrating everything great and British directed by Frank Mannion.
